German R4M Rocket

[KJ_Lesnick]

I'm curious why we didn't just reverse engineer those rather than build the 2.75" FFAR we used?

[rickshaw]

NIH syndrome.    "Not Invented Here".   Something the US military has particularly suffered from but no one is particularly immune to it.   The R4M was also shorter ranged and less accurate than the HVAR.

[Allan]

we all know that Goering was a horrible piece of work and would have fully deserved the fate that Nuremburg decided for him, but there is one incident during the war that gained my sympathy and that is the matter of the threat from the Mosquito wooden plane...Goering begged the German aircraft manufactureres to just copy the Mossie and they just couldn't grasp what he was demanding as they kept repeating that it would take time to develop a plane like the Mossie..."just copy it!", he kept bellowing, to absolutely no avail....the actual record of the conversation I read somewhere, but can't remember where
Allan in Canberra

[rickshaw]

The Ta 154 was the German effort to copy the Mosquito, even being named the "Moskito" in recognition.  Constructed largely of wood, it had considerable potential but was let down by the bonding glue used to fix the wooden skin to the airframe.  Who would have thought, a simple technology like glues was so important to winning or losing the war in the air?

[Allan]

getting back to the original topic, it's strange but somehow or other people just don't like to copy things though you'd think in wartime the thinking would be different
Allan

[chiglet]

The Dh Hornet, follow on to the Mossie also had glue bonding probs in Malaya......

[rickshaw]

The Dh Hornet, follow on to the Mossie also had glue bonding probs in Malaya......

As did the Mosquito in RAAF service.  The tropics is not a good place for a structure relying on organic glues, particularly one made of wood.

[Gondor]

getting back to the original topic, it's strange but somehow or other people just don't like to copy things though you'd think in wartime the thinking would be different
Allan

Making a direct copy is a bad idea during war time because there would be recognition problems with aircraft and tanks etc, missiles, bombs and other ordinance could also cause a problem as your opponents could produce new versions which were different to what your side were used to and thus cause problems in handling if you got your hands on them in the field.

As for copying design ideas, each country has its own way of interpreting design ideas. You only have to look at the various aircraft design submissions to a particular Air Force requirement to see how varied a response could be, even when the competing companies have some of the equipment to be used specified for them, such as the engine type to be used.

Gondor

[Army of One]

The R4M was designed to be ripple/salvo fired at enemy bombef formations wasn't it.....? I have thought many times at how to break up a bomber formation.....I never understood why the Germans didn't use a V2 with loads less fuel and more explosive with internal shrapnel belts......it only has to have enough fuel to get it up to the bomber stream.....? They being so big I imagine you just gotta fire it in the general direction.......it would have to be well camouflaged prior to launch......a couple of those into a formation would cause havoc......wouldn't they....? Then the fighters could pick off the seperated bombers using guns n R4M's.......

[Mr.Creak]

Because "just copying" can, in many circumstances, end up costing far more than coming up with a new but similar design.
It's a safe bet that the R4M was designed and built using metric dimensions while the US was, and still is, a user of the Imperial system.
Yeah, you can "convert" the dimensions but what's not generally recognised is that the entire industry of each of those nations is built around different measuring systems: which means that every component is too.
Want a seal plug for the cabling?
Can't get one the actual size, so you have a choice: go for the nearest equivalent in your own system which then entails knock-on effects throughout the design ¹ or pay someone to make the machine tools to make a seal plug to the size that fits ².
What size tubing is used for the body?
Oh, we (the entire country) don't make that: so do we go for the size above that's closest or the size below? Above and it's more weight, looser fits etc, below and we can't squeeze everything in.
Reverse engineering anything is a b*llache complete nightmare, far more so when there's differing measurement systems involved.

1 For example: the nearest equivalent turns out to be 1/8" larger than the original - you then have to move other components so that there's no interference, which then moves others...
2 Case in point: many years ago the company I worked for was taken over by a US engineering firm and they sent us drawings of their latest design with the instructions "Do new drawings based on these, but in metric, start manufacturing and then start selling". Apart from any other problems (e.g. British Steel hadn't made any Imperial sized round bar for 20 years...) was one plastic component. Again, Imperial and we wanted metric. Sure, we found an injection moulding company who'd make them for us, but they wanted something like £50,000 up front to cut metal on the tooling and then we'd have to go through the whole testing, proving, approving procedure. With the extra caveat that, since no else in the country would be likely to use it then we got charged the entire cost: they couldn't amortise that over massive future sales because there would, always, be a limited market. IIRC in the end we bought them direct from the US for about 1.5p each and fettled them into the metric hole.

[PR19_Kit]

I worked for a US company for 30 years, and they had two totally separate model ranges for European and US markets.

Some of our UK customers, usually the motor industry, bought the US models and everyone else bought the Euro ones. The result was my department had to hold a MASSIVE spares stock, double everything, and some of the bits looked identical but weren't, so that if they were hydraulic seals for instance, you'd need to actually READ the part no. rather than go by what it looked like!

10 yrs ago the US head office decided to make some 'World Standard Models' and adopted what they called 'The Best of Everything' so we had actuators on which the hydraulic fittings were US and the structural bolts were Metric...........

Aaaaaaaaaggghhhhhh! 

[zenrat]

The R4M was designed to be ripple/salvo fired at enemy bombef formations wasn't it.....? I have thought many times at how to break up a bomber formation.....I never understood why the Germans didn't use a V2 with loads less fuel and more explosive with internal shrapnel belts......it only has to have enough fuel to get it up to the bomber stream.....? They being so big I imagine you just gotta fire it in the general direction.......it would have to be well camouflaged prior to launch......a couple of those into a formation would cause havoc......wouldn't they....? Then the fighters could pick off the seperated bombers using guns n R4M's.......

I'm not sure they could aim V2s accurately enough.  Even with big formations.
Plus there's the issue of the ones that didn't detonate and came down on the cities they were supposed to be protecting.
More to the point though, this would mean diverting V2 production from offensive use to defensive and I suspect Hitler wouldn't have allowed it.

[Army of One]

Zenrat......point taken re offensive to defensive.....maybe I didn't fully undrstand the aiming....I thought.....there's hundreds of planes above at a certain set of heights....shoot these big rockets at them with a preset fuse....didn't think of them not going bang.....maybe a failsafe that as it starts to descend it goes bang....self destruct.......but given Hitlers views as you quite rightly pointed out, it be a non starter......even with a country side littered with downed bombers....

[Army of One]

I was thinking a good handful of them fired on known bomber routes a couple of times may have given them space to reorganise........knock a large number of bombers down in one or two raids for the sake of lobbing a few over the channel....I once read that Galland wanted a max effort of fighters  against a bomber raid....1000-1500 fighters to inflict max damage.......instead ended up with 'Op Steinbock'.......

[zenrat]

Actually, if you consider them as Anti Aircraft Artillery then as you say aiming is a moot point as you position them around obvious targets and then just wait until the bombers come to you and then shoot them upwards.